Abstract
A project fork occurs when software developers take a copy of source code from one software package and use it to begin an independent development work that is maintained separately from its origin. Although forking in open source software does not require the permission of the original authors, the new version, nevertheless, competes for the attention of the same developers that have worked on the original version. The motivations developers have for performing forks are many, but in general they have received little attention. In this paper, we present the results of a study of forks performed in SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/) and list the developers’ motivations for their actions. The main motivation, seen in close to half of the cases of forking, was content modification; either adding content to the original program or focusing the content to the needs of a specific segment of users. In a quarter of the cases the motivation was technical modification; either porting the program to new hardware or software, or improving the original.
Chapter PDF
References
Fogel: Producing Open Source Software. O’Reilly, Sebastopol (2006)
Raymond: The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. O’Reilly, Sebastopol (2001)
Moody: The Deeper Significance of LibreOffice 3.3. ComputerWorld UK (January 28, 2011)
Weber: The Success of Open Source. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (2004)
Lerner, Tirole: Some Simple Economics of Open Source. The Journal of Industrial Economics 50(2), 197–234 (2002)
Moody: Who owns commercial open source and can forks work? Linux Journal (April 23, 2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Nyman, L., Mikkonen, T. (2011). To Fork or Not to Fork: Fork Motivations in SourceForge Projects. In: Hissam, S.A., Russo, B., de Mendonça Neto, M.G., Kon, F. (eds) Open Source Systems: Grounding Research. OSS 2011. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 365. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24418-6_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24418-6_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24417-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24418-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)